Chapter 23 The Barn Is Open

Mag Penhallow had been holding the gate of Thornfell for three nights, and she was too old for it.

She knew that. Her knees knew it, and her back, and the hand she held the lantern in, which wouldn't stop shaking now even when she told it to. Seventy-three years old, or seventy-four, she'd lost count somewhere after Hal died. Standing on a fighting step behind a log wall that had gone grey before most of the people behind it were born, with Hal's old boar spear in one hand and a lantern in the other, waiting for the screaming to start again.

It would start again. It always did, about an hour after full dark.

Below her, inside the wall, Thornfell was packed like a sheep pen at shearing. Every family from every holding within ten miles. Kids asleep in the chapel. Old folk in the Black Hound. Cows and pigs and goats penned in the market square, and chooks in crates, and Duchess, who'd been brought in from Marsh Hold the first night with Elsie Fulbright walking at her head, tied up behind the reeve's house with her ears back, refusing to eat.

Mag didn't blame her. Nobody was eating much.

* * *

It had started small, after the knocks. She'd gone up to the barn every evening, the way she'd promised Aldous, and every evening there'd been something. A scratching. A breathing. The plank the boy had nailed over the drain had started to bow upwards in the middle, a little more every week, as if something underneath were leaning on it. Then one evening there was warm air coming up round the edges so strong it lifted her hair.

Then, four nights ago, the plank went.

She hadn't seen it go. Elsie had. Elsie had come up for the evening milking and found the barn doors standing open, the new hinges torn out of the frame, and the floor gone. Not cracked. Gone. A hole where the drain had been, wide as a cart, going down into a dark with a red glow somewhere at the bottom of it, a long way down. And things climbing up the sides of it.

Elsie had been very brave. She'd shut the barn doors, which wouldn't hold anything, and untied Duchess and walked her the whole three hours to Thornfell in the dark without stopping. Then she'd walked into Bram Tully's kitchen with the cow behind her and said, in a perfectly steady voice, that Mister Marsh's barn had a hole in it and something was coming out.

Then she'd sat down on the floor and shaken for an hour, and Annis had held her.

* * *

The screamy ones came first. That was what Tobin called them. Mag had heard him say it, years ago, to Aldous, at the kitchen door.

They came across the paddocks the first night like rags of mist, white and thin and tall, with long arms that trailed on the ground. They didn't walk. They drifted. And they screamed. Not a scream like a person. A scream like the inside of your own head going wrong. When you heard it close, your legs stopped working, and you stood there, and they came right up to you and put their long hands on your face and the warmth went out of you like water out of a cracked jug.

They'd got the hired man some city factor had put on the empty Selby place in the summer, who'd never told anyone what he was there for. And old Pryor, Jory's father, on the second night, in his own paddock, trying to get his sheep in. Jory had watched it from the wall with his one arm and his crossbow and hadn't been able to shoot because his legs wouldn't work, and he hadn't said a word since.

Then the fence-chewers had come. Thousands of them, small and grey and quick, like rats made of iron filings, and they'd eaten every fence between Marsh Hold and Thornfell to the post-holes in a night, and then started on the log wall.

Corrie the smith had held the north side with a forge hammer and a bucket of hot coals, because the chewers hated fire. He'd held it all night. In the morning they'd found him sitting against the wall with the hammer across his knees and the bucket empty and his face grey and peaceful, and he wouldn't wake up. Haddie had sat with him till they buried him.

That was last night.

* * *

She'd sent Bram's boy for Tobin on the first night. Col Tully, nineteen, a good lad, on Pickles, the only horse in Thornfell fast enough. Pickles had kicked Bram's knee to bits twenty years ago and Bram had never forgiven him, but he was quick and he didn't stop.

Four days to Harrowgate, if Col didn't sleep. Then Tobin would have to find out. Then he'd have to come back. Six days, by cart. Five, if he ran.

Mag had done the sum a hundred times in three nights, standing on this step. It came out the same every time. Nobody in Thornfell would last five more days.

She'd written the other letter, too. The one she'd dreaded. Twenty-six years she'd had that name and that address in her head, from Aldous, and never once used it, and she'd sent it off with the Friday post rider five weeks ago now. No answer. Nothing. She'd known there wouldn't be. Aldous had said there mightn't. People who make promises a long time ago don't always keep them. She'd known that too.

Out across the dark paddocks, past the burned-out Pryor place, something screamed.

Then another. Then a dozen at once, rising together, coming in from the east, from the direction of Marsh Hold.

Mag set the lantern down on the step and took the boar spear in both hands.

"Come on, then," she said. "You buggers."

* * *

The Countess caught up with us on the first night out of Coldwater.

She came out of the dark on the road side, the way she always did, but she wasn't walking like herself. Her hair was down. There was river mud on her gown to the knees, and she was furious. Not loudly. Quietly, like the coals at the bottom of a forge.

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"A fourth boat," she said. "Further down. With lanterns on it and a cloaked figure at the rail. I followed it fourteen miles downstream. It was empty. The figure was a coat on a broom." Her voice went very low. "It is the oldest trick there is. I fell for it like a girl at her first ball."

"Where's Lys?" I said.

"On the river. On a fast boat. They'll be in Harrowgate before us." She looked at me. "I'll find where they take her. I can do that. It's what I'm for."

She went on ahead that night, into the dark, west. We followed on foot.

It took us three and a half days. I could have done it in less. I didn't. Miss Quill couldn't, and I wasn't leaving her on the road with a copy of that ledger sewn into her coat, not after what Sir Gareth had said on the wharf about accidents. So we went at her pace, and Brakka's lot went round us like a fence, and Rusk and his twelve went in front, and nobody came near us the whole way.

I thought about Thornfell the whole time. Two days south, the whole way. I kept turning my head that way without meaning to, like a dog that knows where its kennel is.

The farm's kept seventeen years, I told myself. It'll keep.

* * *

We came into Harrowgate on the forty-first day, at noon, through the east gate. The gate guard looked at me, and at the cleaver, and at Brakka, and opened his mouth to say weapon tax, and closed it again.

Widow Ostry was on her front step on Candle Lane with a broom. She stopped sweeping when she saw me.

"Mister Marsh."

"Mrs Ostry. Sorry. I'm a week behind on the rent."

"You are." She looked at me. At the tabard, filthy now, and the hole in Hal's coat, and my face, whatever my face was doing. "Your room's kept. Fourteen silver. That's the week you owe and the week coming." She paused. "Once. No nerves. You were working."

I paid her. Fourteen silver. Seventy-nine gold, in the ledger, give or take.

Then I went up to the Guild, to find out if anyone knew where Gareth had taken the princess. And on the steps of the Guild, in the middle of the afternoon crowd, with people stepping round him, there was a lad sitting with his head in his hands next to a horse that was so blown it could hardly stand.

I knew the horse. Grey, with one white sock. It had kicked a man's knee to bits twenty years ago.

"Col?" I said.

Col Tully looked up.

His face was grey with dust and his eyes were red. When he saw me he stood up so fast he nearly fell down again, and Pickles saw me at the same moment and went backwards down the Guild steps, sliding and scrabbling, with his ears flat and his eyes white, until he fetched up against a horse trough at the bottom and stood there shaking.

"Tobin," said Col. "Oh, thank the gods. Tobin. They said you'd gone east. I've been sitting here a day and a half. Mag sent me." He grabbed my arm. "Your barn's open."

* * *

He told me all of it standing there on the steps. It came out of him in a rush, the way things do when you've been holding them for four days on a horse.

The knocks Mag had heard the week I left. The plank bowing up. The floor going. The hole, wide as a cart, with a red light at the bottom. The screamy ones, and the fence-chewers, and old Pryor dead in his own paddock. Corrie dead on the wall. Thornfell packed full and the wall being eaten from the outside. Mag on the gate with Hal's boar spear, sixty years too old for it.

"She said come home," said Col. "She said tell him come home now."

I didn't say anything.

I was thinking about the knocks. The week I left. Mag had heard them the evening after I walked out of the gate. Not the week before. Not any other week, in seventeen years, with a plank over the drain or without one. The week I left.

The week I took the cleaver off its hook by the flue, and slung it on my back, and carried it away.

Dad never left the farm. Not for more than a day, in thirty years. Not for his own wedding. Mag had told me that, on her veranda, and I'd said he liked it there.

Grandad hung the cleaver by the flue every night. Dad did the same. I'd hung it there since I was nine, because that was where it went. And the one time it left Marsh Hold for longer than a trip to Thornfell, something started knocking under the floor.

And the horses. Biscuit, going funny when I was ten, the year after I first picked up the cleaver. Every horse since. Every dog. The crossbow bolts I could see coming the whole way. The stones that cracked. Haines's sword. Gareth, purple in the face, unable to shift a meat cleaver off a bench. Brakka over the bar. The Countess, out cold on my chest in the fog. The rats. Two hundred rats, give or take, that the Guild had only managed nine of in its whole history. With parties of six. Most of whom didn't come home.

It wasn't them. It had never been them. It wasn't cheap crossbows, or old stones, or tired knights, or a woman who'd had a big night. You put it all in a row, side by side, like a fence, and there was no old wood left. Just patches. And under the patches, all along, the whole length of it, there was only one thing.

"It's me," I said.

Col looked at me. "What?"

"It's me." I said it again, to hear it. "It's always been me."

* * *

Miss Quill had come up the steps behind me. I didn't know how long she'd been there. She was standing very close, with her satchel held against her chest, and her face was white and very calm.

"Miss Quill," I said. "Now. Tell me."

She didn't ask what. She just told me.

She did it quickly, and plainly, standing on the steps of the Guild with people going round us. About the Ledger, and the three runes, and how there wasn't a fourth. About a book by a man called Thale. About how many big rats I'd killed, and what each one was worth, the way the Guild counted. About nine hundred and ninety-nine, and what happens after it, the way a wheel loses the count of its turns. About her arithmetic. About stopping when it needed a fifth rune.

"You're not Level one," she said. "You've never been Level one. Not since you were fourteen. Probably earlier." Her voice shook, just once, and she stopped it. "You're past the end of the count, Tobin. A long way past. The stone reads you as one because it can't read you at all."

I stood there.

Dad's voice, at the kitchen table, over his pipe. You're nothing special, son. Just stubborn.

He'd said it every day. Every single day of my life. Not because it was true. Because he needed it to be. Because a boy who thinks he's nothing special stays home, and hangs the cleaver by the flue every night, and stamps twice on the boards, and doesn't ask why.

He'd known. The whole time. He'd known, and he'd lied to me every day, so I'd stay. So the barn would stay shut.

I'd told Miss Quill by the fire that Dad wasn't a liar. And he wasn't, mostly. He'd only told the one. He'd just told it every day for seventeen years.

* * *

"Go," said Miss Quill.

I looked at her.

"Go home," she said. "Now. Today. You can't do anything here for Lys that we can't do. Elodie will find where they've taken her. Brakka will get her out. I'll get the copies to someone who'll read them." She took a breath. "We count, Tobin. That's what we're for. Let us count."

Brakka had come up behind her. Her face was set. She nodded once.

"Go, husband," she said. "Your farm is burning. I will get your princess. Then I will kill the golden knight. Then I will come. Go."

I looked at the two of them. And at Col Tully, grey and shaking on the steps. And at Pickles, by the trough, still trying to back away from me through solid stone.

Six days by cart to Thornfell.

I'd walked it in six. I'd never once in my life tried to see how fast I could do it, because I'd never once in my life thought there was any point. Because I was nothing special. Because I was just stubborn.

I put my hand on Miss Quill's shoulder. I didn't know what else to do. She put her hand over mine and held it, very hard, for about the length of a breath.

Then I turned round and went down the steps and through the crowd and down the hill towards the east gate.

I started walking. By the time I got to the gate, I was running.